This lab introduces the concept of Elastic Load Balancing (ELB). In this lab you will use ELB to load balance a set of web servers in an Availability Zone. You will launch a pair of Amazon EC2 instances, bootstrap them to install web servers and content, and then access the instances independently using Amazon EC2 DNS records. Next, you will set up ELB, add your instances to the ELB, and then access the ELB DNS record to watch your requests load balance between servers. Finally, you will look at ELB metrics in CloudWatch. To successfully complete this lab, you should be familiar with the AWS Management Console.

This lab will demonstrate how to create an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network using AWS CloudFormation. Note: This lab is a more of a walkthrough of a template rather than "learn how to build it". You will walk through the sections of an AWS CloudFormation template and get explanations for each step. You will then launch the AWS CloudFormation template to create a four-subnet Amazon VPC that spans two Availability Zones and a NAT that allows servers in the private subnets to communicate with the Internet in order to download packages and updates.

This lab introduces the basics of Auto Scaling, highlighting multiple Auto Scaling use cases and the command-line tools used for Auto Scaling configuration. After completing this lab you will have configured and tested an elastic web farm which automatically scales capacity to accommodate load. In addition you will have explored a steady state use case in which Auto Scaling is used to maintain high availability of critical resources.